Brittle stars, closely related to starfish, mostly reproduce externally but some species develop their young internally, and then “give birth” to live young. First author, Jannes Landschoff, from the Applied Marine Science Institute at the University of Cape Town says: “Our goal was to visualise the very large brooded juveniles inside the adults without disturbing the surrounding tissues. At first, we purely wanted to show the feasibility, but we soon realised how amazing the three-dimensional visualisations looked and that our rotation movies attracted much interest…”

The technique, named microcomputed tomography, has been used to study the morphology of marine species and has been used for the first time to obtain 3D images of brooded young inside the mothers of two viviparous (live-bearing) species of brittle star, without having to dissect the mothers.

In this way the authors ensured that the positions of those young were not disturbed, as might happen during dissection. Through the 3D animation, one can also view the young inside the mothers from various angles, displayed throughout this study.

In recognizing the extremely high quality of the images they used to study the brittle star development, and that the data included much more information than they actually used, GigaScience publications decided to add this to their repository by containing raw data and an associated explanatory data note, while the formal presentation of the study, including the synthesis and interpretation of the information and its placement in the context of existing knowledge can be found in the paper published in African Journal of Marine Science.

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